Roses of Georgetown

Today.

Hispanics Becoming White

Here's an interesting sidelight on the question of whether the U.S. will ever become a "majority minority" society:

The researchers found that 2.5 million Americans of Hispanic origin, or approximately 7 percent of the 35 million Americans of Hispanic origin in 2000, changed their race from “some other race” in 2000 to “white” in 2010. An additional 1.3 million people switched in the other direction. A noteworthy but unspecified share of the change came from children who weren’t old enough to fill out a form in 2000, but chose for themselves in 2010. The data provide new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or Irish, who were not universally considered to be white.

I can also imagine many Indian Americans declaring themselves white. And what about the offspring of marriages between whites and Asians, or WASPs and Hispanics? A half black, half white person was traditionally considered black in the US -- although this is not necessarily true now -- but the offspring of other sorts of mixed marriages have no such clear historical precedent and can call themselves pretty much whatever they want.

This seems to confirm the prescience of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argued a few years ago that the "majority minority" society was a hoax because large groups of Hispanics would be assimilated into white America. White America, he said, would always allow enough people in to maintain its majority status.

Slawenburg Raddusch

Slawenburg Raddusch is one of about forty medieval "ring  fortresses" so far discovered in the Niederlausitz (Lower Lusatia) district of eastern Germany. The fortresses were built in the ninth and tenth centuries, this one in about 880 CE. They were built by Slavs of the Lusitzi tribe. (Slawenburg just means Slavic Castle). Historians think the great concentration of fortresses may be related to the expansion of German-speakers into the area, which was ruled sporadically in the tenth century by the German emperors.

Slawenburg Raddusch was discovered in the 1990s by archaeologists working in advance of coal mining. It was reconstructed in the original style, which is a log frame filled in with earth. The base of the wall is almost 10 meters (33 feet) thick; the interior space measures 35 by 36 meters (115 by 118 feet).

Drawing of the site in the tenth century. You can see that the inside of the fortress was not built up; these ring fortresses seem to have functioned mainly as refuges for people who lived outside, not places of residence in themselves. The fort was built in a boggy area and surrounded by a moat.

Aerial view.

There is also a museum on the site which displays artifacts found during the excavation and also at other sites nearby. The site was occupied off and on from the Neolithic in the Middle Ages. The most spectacular find is this wooden idol of a Slavic god, found in the fortress itself.

This object is shown on the museum's web site under the Bronze Age section, but it is not otherwise identified. Is it a miniature, ritual plow?

Seems like a fascinating site, and just the kind of place I would like to dig.

House Votes for Modest Limits on NSA Surveillance

Great news from Washington:

The House on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to rein in the National Security Agency’s sweeping collection of telephone records, approving scaled-back legislation that sharply divided the technology sector and civil libertarians but united the White House, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. The 303-to-121 vote sent an unambiguous signal that both parties are no longer comfortable with giving the N.S.A. unfettered power to collect bulk surveillance data.

Personally I think these limits are not nearly enough -- they were watered down at the last minute after White House lobbying, which led the Internet companies to turn against them -- but at least they're something. If we keep pushing, we may get real limits eventually. As a bonus, this is an issue on which Tea Partiers and liberals can work together.

Feminism and the Patriarchy, or, Can Everybody Have Power?

From a rather tedious Times piece on which singers and actresses consider themselves “feminists,” I extract this little rant from magazine publisher Andi Zeisler:

“I don’t care if people don’t identify as feminist,” Ms. Zeisler said. She does have a problem with misinformation and the perpetuation of the idea that feminism is “this zero-sum game that if it elevates women, then it denigrates men. That’s just wrong and has never been what feminism is about. That’s the Fox News version of feminism.”

I have been meaning to write about this for a long time, so let me take this excuse to do so. I was raised on rhetoric like Zeisler's; I must have read or heard ten thousand times that feminism was not about diminishing men, but on the contrary would also liberate men. Honestly I never gave the question much thought, because my politics are so thoroughly egalitarian that it just didn't matter to me. As far as I am concerned, women deserve equality with men, and that's that. It has only been over the past decade or so, as I contemplate the collapse of family life among America's poor, the steadily shrinking percentage of men who work, and the vast dissatisfaction of so many Americans with existing social arrangements, that I have begun to question whether what Zeisler says is true or even logically possible. How can everyone gain power at once? If some people get more power, doesn't that mean -- nay, doesn't that logically require -- that somebody else gets less? If there is a democratic revolution and the aristocrats or the generals are overthrown, isn't the power gained by the people necessarily taken from the aristocrats or generals, so that they end up with less? Isn't power in fact a zero-sum game, so that giving more to women necessarily means taking it from men?

Consider this model: there is only so much power in a family. Decisions have to be made: where to live, whether to have children, whether to buy a new car. In some theoretical patriarchal model of the family, the husband makes all of these decisions. In an equally theoretical egalitarian model, all these decisions have to be negotiated between the spouses until some kind of consensus is reached. Doesn't that give the man less power? Isn't that what power means?

Could it be the reason that America (and Russia, and maybe lots of other places) is so full of angry men is that patriarchy was a good deal for men? And that the social changes of the past 50 years have stripped men, and especially white men, of power and privilege that were very valuable to them?

I do understand what 1970s feminists meant when they spoke of liberating men. The model they had in mind was that under the patriarchy men had to assume a certain well-defined social role and act in certain limited ways. Men were supposed to be tough and strong and responsible and get up and go to work every day no matter what. They had to wear the right clothes, whether that meant suits or cowboy boots; they had to talk in the right manly way; they had to follow sports and talk sports talk; they couldn't ever show weakness or admit to preferring art to football. The code was enforced by vicious taunting of pansies and fairies and eggheads and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Feminism was supposed to liberate men by breaking down this stereotype and freeing men to act however they wanted. Some might prefer to keep acting like tough guys, but others could explore their "feminine sides."

But as my readers know, I have grown skeptical of the notion that more freedom necessarily makes people happier. I think a lot of people miss those well-defined social roles. More, I think that a lot of families sort of half recreate them, leading to a confused mishmash of traditional gender roles with egalitarianism and idiosyncrasy. Which works perfectly well for a lot of people, but is not necessarily all that liberating for anyone. The distance between the reality of overworked two-career couples, busy all the time but never satisfied with the state of their homes and still feeling pinched for money, and the shining dream of a free, egalitarian world seems very great.

My politics have not changed; I still believe that equality of race and sex are values of supreme importance. Whatever solutions we come up with can't involve a return to patriarchy and race privilege. But I more and more think that we are watching in our time the painful dissolution of an ancient social order. The breakdown of obvious gender distinctions -- men fight and work in fields or factories, women have babies and tend to homes and gardens -- has left everyone more free but also more confused. We have great trouble answering fundamental questions -- What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? -- that scarcely troubled most people in history. We are paying a price for this in unhappiness and loss of direction. In America the biggest losers in this shift have been working class men, and especially white working class men. In the old order they had strict limits on their behavior but if they followed the rules and went to work every day they got real rewards in power and status, and they knew who they were. Today the only privilege that still counts is the privilege of money; the rich are doing just great. But all of the non-rich are descending into a sort of social stew in which nobody has any advantage or any clear role and we all swim about as best we can.

Some people are doing about as well with this arrangement as anyone ever has; in fact the overall level of satisfaction in our society is ok, and we have certainly made great strides in equality and fairness of several kinds. But some people, especially men, are floundering. I see the conservative politics of our time as largely an angry reaction to these changes from men who don't really know what has gone wrong but feel deeply that they are not the men their grandfathers were.

Light in the Landscape by Barry Underwood

These are kind of cool. More at This is Colossal.

Coup in Thailand

As in Egypt, so in Thailand; when the democratic parties care more about getting their own way than preserving democracy, the way is opened for the generals to take over.

You can't have a democracy if the political factions are not willing to lose.

Supercell Thunderstorm over Kansas by Stephen Locke

Video here.

Egyptian Bracelet, 1st Century CE

From the Met's Highlights of the Collection.

Bullying Weaklings is Good for your Health

A major study of children in North Carolina has been in the news because of the findings about bullying:

The researchers asked 1,420 youngsters between the ages of 9 and 16 whether and how often they had been bullied or had bullied others. Interviewers asked participants whether they felt more teased, bullied or treated meanly by siblings, friends and peers than other children and whether they had upset or hurt other people on purpose, tried to get others in trouble or forced people to do something by threatening or hurting them.

The researchers took finger-stick blood tests at each assessment. Interviews took place once a year until the participants turned 16, and again when they were 19 and 21. The children interviewed were participants in the larger Great Smoky Mountains Study, in which some 12,000 children in North Carolina were assessed to track the development of psychiatric conditions.

The study shows that the bullied children have high levels of an inflammatory agent known as CRP in their blood, a sign of stress that has been correlated with ill health of various kinds. This may be part of the reason that children who are bullied suffer more depression and worse health in general throughout life.

Meanwhile, children who bully others have reduced levels of CRP, and seem to have better health as they age:

Despite the implied health benefits of bullying, Copeland doesn’t advocate picking on people to better your health. The advantage probably doesn’t lie in the aggression itself but rather in the heightened control, power and social status that bullies enjoy, he believes.

The benefits of bullying are dispiriting but not surprising, says biological anthropologist Thomas McDade of Northwestern University. The slower-than-normal increase of CRP in bullies supports a growing mound of research showing that those at the top have it better, he says.

Do they ever.

This sort of finding is of course interesting in its own right, but it also connects to important political issues. By politics here I mean, not electioneering, but the base views of life that underlie our political choices. If you wanted to define contemporary American liberalism, you could do a lot worse than to start from the anti-bullying movement: liberals think adults should do everything humanly possible to prevent cruelty between children and foster in every child, and therefore every adult, the sort of confidence that leads to good mental and physical health. Conservatives are much more likely to regard this crusade as either unlikely to work, because it is so strongly against our basic animal natures, or to involve an unacceptable price in terms of money (paying for an army of social workers and school psychologists), interference with the development of real excellence through competition, and stupid nonsense like self-esteem building exercises and trophies for everyone. Even if the crusade worked (says my conservative straw man) the result would likely be an epidemic of narcissism and a generation so coddled that they can't cope with the stresses of adult life.

I find myself conflicted. The rotten ways kids treat each other disgust me, and the scars left by bullying are real and deep. But on the other hand I don't see any evidence that children growing up now (e.g., my own) are psychologically healthier than my generation was. I think the alleged epidemic of narcissism among the young is a lot of hype; yes, some people adore selfies and tweet the inane details of their lives, but there have always been people like that. What I see among the young people I know is more the reverse, a terrible lack of confidence, along with a lot of depression. Does that have anything to do with how they have been raised? If so, what can we do about it? Is bullying the right place to focus our attention, or is there something else we could do that might help more?

Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil is for Sale

In 1868 Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painted two versions of this famous scene from an epic poem by Keats. (Based on a story from Boccaccio's Decameron.) In the story Isabella's lover Lorenzo is murdered by her brothers. She digs up his body, decapitates it, takes the head home and plants it in a pot of basil:

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.

These paintings were a sensational hit, selling for the then huge sum of 1800 guineas -- at least a million dollars in today's terms -- and critic Cosmo Monkhouse once called this "the painting of the century." The larger version of the painting ended up in an English museum, but the smaller was bought by American railroad tycoon John Taylor Johnston and his been in the U.S. ever since. Now it is being sold at Christie's in London by the Delaware Art Museum, with an expected price of £5,000,000-8,000,000.

The museum needs to raise $19 million to pay off debts run up while expanding their facilities -- great idea, to enlarge your museum and then pay for it by selling all your best paintings.

Cancer Sniffing Dogs

Two dogs that have been trained to sniff urine for traces of prostate cancer are 98% accurate, according to a new paper. But since existing blood tests are only 80% accurate, how do they know the dogs are wrong 2% of the time? Maybe the dogs are always right and the doctors are wrong 2% of the time.

There is nothing surprising about this; people can learn to smell advanced cancer, and anything people can do with their noses dogs can do a thousand times better. Dogs detect individuality at the genetic level -- to bloodhounds, identical twins smell like the same person no mater what you do to disguise their scents. Since cancer is genetically different from other cells, of course it smells different to them. The interesting question would be about the threshold, and whether dogs can  make diagnoses early enough to be medically useful.

Who is Represented?

There is near consensus in the empirical literature that politicians’ positions more accurately reflect the views of their donors than those of their constituents.

--Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos

Common Core Will Turn Your Children Gay

And you thought Common Core was just another in the long line of doomed attempts to reform American education from the top. No, it is much more insidious than that. Let Florida State Rep. Charles Van Zant explain it to you:

These people, that will now receive $220 million from the state of Florida unless this is stopped, will promote double-mindedness in state education and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can. I’m sorry to report that to you.

Glenn Beck has been saying for years that Common Core is a secular socialist plot to enslave us, but not even he grasped the full horror of this liberal master plan: it will turn your children into secular socialist gay slaves.

I mean, consider this obviously seditious excerpt from Maryland's Common Core Standards for Language Arts:

The way we taught students in the past simply does not prepare them for the higher demands of college and careers today and in the future. Your school and schools throughout the country are working to improve teaching and learning to ensure that all children will graduate high school with the skills they need to be successful.

In English language arts and literacy, this means three major changes. Students will continue reading and writing. But in addition to stories and literature, they will read more texts that provide facts and background knowledge in areas including science and social studies. They will read more challenging texts and be asked more questions that will require them to refer back to what they have read. There will also be an increased emphasis on building a strong vocabulary so that students can read and understand challenging material.

Scary stuff.

In case you were wondering, "double-mindedness" is from the Bible, a reference to people who are weak in their faith:

But he must ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. (James 1:2-11)

Georgia O'Keeffe's House at Abiquiu

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) rose to prominence as an artist living in New York with her husband, gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. But Steiglitz was a social man whose life was constant round of parties, salons, meetings, and gatherings, so O'Keefe never got much of the solitude she needed for her work. Even when they went to his family place in upstate New York there were always relatives and guests around. O'Keeffe had been to New Mexico in 1917 and fallen in love with the landscape, and as she grew more frustrated with her crowded, busy New York life she longed to get back. In 1929 she wrote to a friend, "When I saw my exhibition last year I knew I must get back to some of my own ways or quit -- it was mostly all dead for me."

In 1929 she finally went back to Taos, staying at first at the artists' colony established by Mabel Luhan. But that was another busy social scene, and O'Keeffe kept looking for someplace quieter. She rented various homes and then in 1934 she bought her first house, a new building in a style sometimes called "Pueblo Revival" on a property called the Ghost Ranch. O'Keeffe lived in the Ghost Ranch house for many years and loved the spectacular desert landscape around it, which she painted many times. But O'Keeffe loved flowers and wanted a place where she could garden, and about the only flower that grew reliably around the Ghost Ranch house was jimson weed. (Which may explain why she painted those flowers so often in the 1930s.)

In 1945 she bought a second house in the village of Abiquiu that came with enough water rights to maintain a garden. From then until her death at he age of 99 she divided her time between the two houses, and now both are museums devoted to her life and work. Both are wonderfully described and illustrated in a new book by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Agapita Judy Lopez, published by the Georgia O'Keeffee Museum. Perhaps I will write about to Ghost Ranch some other time, but since I love gardens more than deserts I will focus first on the Abiquiu House.

Two views of the gardens.

The adobe walls and old wood create many amazing views, many of which O'Keeffe painted over the years. These photographs are by Paul Hester and Lisa Hardaway; I especially love their images of the house in the snow, like the one at the top of the post.

More images of entrances and the patio.

The book also includes many older photographs, taken during O'Keeffe's lifetime. I notice that most of these date to the 1960s or later, when O'Keeffe was an old woman. The point of moving to New Mexico was, after all, to be left in peace, and it seems that while she was still painting very actively she did not encourage prying photographers to take up her time. As her own painting slowed down she slid into another role, as an icon of twentieth-century art, posing for many wonderful photographs like this one by Yousuf Karsh.

So there is an extensive photographic record of the house in the 60s and 70s. Sadly, that was the nadir of western interior design, and not even O'Keeffe could rise above the awfulness of contemporary decor.

On the other hand her 1950s kitchen still looks great.

I think it is a wonderful thing when an artist leaves a home that is as much her creation as any painting or novel, a place where we can think about her life and her private world. I would love to visit Georgia O'Keeffe's houses, and meanwhile there is this delightful book.

Money and Graduation

Stark numbers about who finishes college:

When you look at the national statistics on college graduation rates, there are two big trends that stand out right away. The first is that there are a whole lot of students who make it to college — who show up on campus and enroll in classes — but never get their degrees. More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.

The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

High school grades and test scores have very little impact compared to the sort of family you come from. Obviously money is part of this -- everything is easier when you're not worried about money -- but it may be that psychological factors are even more important. People from working class homes suffer major culture shock in college and have trouble maintaining their focus on subjects that seem theoretical and irrelevant. It is just much easier to make it through college if you have been raised to think of it as a natural, even inevitable part of life that is somehow crucial to achieving a life like your parents'.

The article this comes from is about efforts at the University of Texas to overcome these psychological problems, and I am sure there are things that can be done in the way of counseling, special study sections, and so on. A little bit of encouragement can go a long way with some 19-year-olds.

But that, of course, means hiring more administrators and making college yet more expensive -- all those administrators that professors like to blame for running  up costs don't get hired for no reason, you know, but because somebody thought they were vital to the college's mission. It also makes me wonder, why are universities so bad at giving this sort of support in the first place? Why do so many American students feel adrift and ignored in college, left on their own to cope with a bizarre array of courses and options that seem equally boring and irrelevant? Our huge multiversities are impressive in the breadth of learning and myriad other opportunities they offer, but do their size and scope actually detract from the core mission of educating young minds?

May Flowers

It has been a perfect weekend to putter in the garden, and I have taken full advantage. The clematis in the herb garden is looking very fine.

My irises are coming back. Last year they suffered a big die-off and didn't bloom at all, but this year I have three healthy-looking plants and two are blooming nicely.

One of my self-seeded white columbine. These have been coming up on their own for at least five years, the descendants of lovely blue and yellow ones that I bought from the garden center. Since wild columbine is red, I don't understand why these reversions aren't red, too. I guess the domestic ones have some new mutations that make them fundamentally different from the wild ones.

Emily Dickinson's Wonderful Fragments

Emily Dickinson's poetry is an elusive, unfinished thing. Only a dozen of her poems were published during her lifetime, and the rest are known only from manuscripts. Even the most polished of these contain scratched out words, alternative words and phrases noted in the margins, and strange punctuation that has to be cleaned up by her editors before the poems are presented to the public.

But until recently only Dickinson scholars knew about these even less finshed "fragments," left about the room she lived in as a virtual recluse and swept into a file after death. They are scrawled on any odd bit of paper that came to hand, but especially envelopes. Now they have been published in a wonderful facsimile volume by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, titled The Gorgeous Nothings, so we can all get to know them.

Strange as these seem, they are really not so different from some of her messier poems -- even after the editors have chosen the words to print, some of these seem more like a series of thoughts dashed off in idle moments than a sonnet. I wonder how many of her famous works started out like these?